


He's just a little boy

by Niitza



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coda, De-Aged Dean, Episode: s10e12 About A Boy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 19:33:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3301010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niitza/pseuds/Niitza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>10x12 Coda fic. In which things are more or less the same, except that de-aged!Dean doesn't remember anything from age fourteen onwards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He's just a little boy

**Author's Note:**

> Because while I liked the episode and Dylan Everett's performance was amazing, I'm sure I'm not the only one to be frustrated by the lack of Sam!feels about teen!Dean and the lost opportunity for some role reversal and questioning about Dean's role as a parent.
> 
> Fortunately, that's why we have fic.

A kid.

It's a fucking kid, lying unconscious on the ground. Sam screeches to a halt, confused—he would've sworn, from further away, that it was his brother collapsing in front of that old man. Not a teenager.

But a teenager it is, who's now stirring and groaning. Sam crouches down to help him sit up. The kid blinks, winces, presses a hand to his temple with a vehement mutter of: "Son of a _bitch_."

A vehement mutter that sounds very, weirdly familiar, so much that it gives Sam pause. He takes a closer look at the teenager's face and— and—

Oh, _crap_.

The kid is now looking around in confusion, clearly not expecting to wake up so late, right in the middle of a nearly deserted parking lot, between a dirty wall and an even dirtier dumpster.

"… The hell?" Sam hears him mumble, before he notices his presence, clearly a bit too close for comfort. He startles, tears his arms out of Sam's grip and scoots away.

"Dean?" Sam can't help but blurt when their eyes meet.

The teenager's eyebrows twitch and his expression closes itself off, grows guarded. "Who're you?"

Okay, that can't be good.

"I—" Sam hesitates. "Okay, first of all, calm down." Mostly he's trying to calm _himself_ down. He reaches out a hand, because he needs to check—

"Don't _touch_ me!" the boy snarls, scrambling away and—and suddenly there's a gun in Sam's face, Dean's gun, which the teenager probably picked up from the ground.

"Wow wow wow okay, _okay_ —" Sam raises his hands to show he's unarmed and cautiously leans away while Dean—it _has_ to be him, but he looks so _young_ , did he ever look that young?—stumbles to his feet. It's not easy, because the clothes he's covered in are the same he—or at least his older self—was wearing not ten minutes earlier.

He manages, though: the gun doesn't falter in his grip for one second. Which… is actually more freaky than if it did.

"Why don't you—" Sam starts, aiming for an appeasing tone. He doesn't move from his crouch.

Dean cuts him off at once. "I won't _anything_. You'd think the situation's pretty clear but who knows, you might actually be even dumber than you look." Well, it's nice to know that Dean hasn't lost any of his snark. "So here's how it's gonna happen: I ask the questions and you answer, or I put a bullet in your retarded brain, got it?"

Sam curls his lips in a show of agreement and shrugs. "Fine."

"Where are we? How did you bring me here, did you roofie me?" the boy asks in swift succession, not leaving Sam the time to even open his mouth. And that's when Sam realizes that Dean's nervous, no, _frightened_. He's terrified, even though he's covering it up. But Sam can see it, behind a veneer of anger, deep in his eyes—which suddenly widen before Dean asks: "Where's Sam?"

Oh, sweet irony.

"Where is—" Sam refrains from sighing. He's gathering that the teenager in front of him doesn't remember a thing from the time right before he lost consciousness—or the more or less twenty years before that, either. He changes gears. "Look, I have no idea who you're talking about," he says, trying to sound reasonable. "I just saw you lying on the ground, and I came to check if you were alright, okay?"

"Oh, so you're just a good samaritan, that's it?" the boy says, raising his eyebrows skeptically. When Sam nods tentatively, he lets the act drop: "Then how come you know my name?"

Damn it. Why can't Dean be like any other confused trauma victim and forget that kind of inconvenient details?

"What did you do to my brother?" he asks, voice rising.

Like there is any explanation Sam can give that'll sound acceptable to him. "I don't—"

"Stop lying to me!" the boy bellows—and Sam is really uncomfortable with how comfortable the gun looks in his grip, unwavering and deadly and… wrong, in such young hands. "Or I'll shoot, I swear."

Fortunately (?) that's when the dark blue slacks precariously clinging to his slim hips give up and slump to the ground. Only the length of his now too large dress shirt prevents the teenager from flashing everyone in the vicinity. Not that there's anyone around.

An awkward pause follows. Dean looks furious, gun still raised but cheeks beet red.

"Maybe," Sam says tentatively, lips twitching. "We should take this somewhere else?"

 

*

 

"Fourteen?" Cas says on the other end of the line.

"Yeah."

" _Fourteen_?" he repeats. Sam doesn't know if he's incredulous or implicitly begging to have heard wrong.

" _Yes_."

He glances through the motel room window at Dean, who's sitting at the table right underneath it, leafing through Dad's journal. He's changed into a set of more familiar clothes but they still look huge on him, dwarf him really, make him appear even younger than he says he is.

The frown on his face, though, is the same. His focus, too, as he looks for something, anything. It's almost eerie, and it was almost terrifying, earlier, back in the car, after Sam had managed to convince him that he hadn't gone insane and that the plates indeed indicated that it was 2015—how he started to lay out a plan, a list of things to do in order to resolve the case as quickly as possible.

Sam racks his brain but can't for the life of him remember if he himself was as involved, as expert with hunting, when he was fourteen. He remembers helping a bit with case research at the library, but not actually being on the field, not conducting the investigation himself, not even knowing _how_.

Dean does, though. This Dean does, all but fourteen, and part of Sam is horrified, because maybe he didn't see it when he himself was ten and looked up to his big brother, but he sees it now: Dean's a kid. Nothing but a kid, who has no place on a hunt, or in these squalid motel rooms, or holding a gun.

_What the hell?_ is repeating inside his head. _What the hell, Dad? What were you_ thinking _?_

"Look," he says into the phone. "Does any of this sounds familiar to you?"

"Not really," Cas admits. "But I don't think it's angel work. Their speciality is to send someone forwards or back in the timeline, not to rejuvenate them. Besides, it'd be beyond the power of most who survived. No, it's something else. I'm not sure what."

Sam grunts, frustrated. Of course it can't be another rogue angel. Of course it can't be that simple.

"I should come help, though, if he's a child again you brother is definitely in no state to fight. Where are you right now?"

"Cas, no, we both know—"

"Helping you right now is more important than my quest to find—" He suddenly pauses. "Sam."

"What?"

"… I have to ask: did you check?"

Sam frowns, nonplussed. "Did I check what?"

"The Mark, is it still here?"

"The Mark?" he throws another glance at Dean, who's still engrossed in the journal, like he still believes it holds all the answers. Hell, given his age, he probably does. He's had no reason to doubt it up until now. "No, I don't think—" He turns away as he goes on: "He doesn't remember anything between age fourteen and now, and from what I gather that Mark _hurts_. He probably would've noticed the brand new tattoo if he still had it. He doesn't seem overly aggressive or anything, so… No. I don't think he still has it."

"Okay, this is… This is good," Cas says. And he doesn't need to add anything for Sam to know that they're suddenly thinking the same thing: that this is undoubtedly a silver lining to a terrible situation. One that might make them reconsider returning Dean to his thirty-six year old self.

The problem is, only Dean can take that decision. And right now he's in no state to make such a choice. He doesn't know enough. He'll never know enough.

"Yeah," Sam agrees, still. "Look, I think it's better if you keep looking for Cain, okay? We'll try to deal with this on our own. If it turns out we're in over our heads, I'll call back, I promise."

Cas is obviously reluctant, but finally agrees—because he knows that sticking Dean in his fourteen year old body isn't an actual solution and because he's aware that trying to explain _him_ to the teenager would be… complicated, and long.

They hang up, and Sam goes fetch some food before he returns to the room. When Dean sees the burgers he beams and starts eating at once, voracious like it's the first proper meal he's had in days.

Hell, for all Sam knows, it is. This he remembers clearly, how sometimes Dad took too long coming back and their supplies ran low, how they had to stretch it out to make sure it'd last enough and how Dean would always get the smaller portion, if he ate anything at all. Now Sam looks at him and sees the consequences in a way he never perceived before: Dean's pale, with bags under his eyes, because he doesn't sleep enough; he's a bit gangly, almost emaciated, even though he clearly hasn't gone through his growth spurt yet, because he doesn't eat enough.

Sam wants to bundle him in a blanket, wants to feed him. Want to send him to school, instead of on a hunt.

"Hey… Sam," Dean says once most of his meal is gone and he's munching on his last burger bite. The name comes out belatedly, as if he still has a hard time reconciling the tall thirty year old sitting opposite him with the puny ten year old his brother is for him. Sam gets it: he has the exact same problem, only in reverse.

"Yeah?" he says, preparing himself for any kind of questions, wondering if there are some he shouldn't answer. Like about Dad.

But Dean doesn't ask about Dad. Instead he asks, not meeting Sam's gaze:

"What's 'the Mark'?"

Sam freezes.

Again: _Crap_.

He should've checked the window was shut.

 

*

 

"Dean," Sam calls, hurrying after the teenager. "Dean, _stop_!"

Dean does and whirls around. "Stop?" he says, almost screeches. "How can you ask me to stop?"

"You have to calm down," Sam pleads.

"You just told me future me's some enraged half-demon, and you want me to _calm down_?" Dean explodes, trying to sound angry instead of half-hysterical. "The fuck, Sam!"

There's not much Sam can say to that. He knew he shouldn't have answered that question honestly.

"We have to reverse this crap, and we have to do it _now_ ," the boy insists. "There's nothing in dad's journal, so we have to go investigate, okay?"

"No," Sam replies. "Look, Dean, it's late, we're tired, especially after…" He gestures at his brother. "We should sleep, we can do more in the morning."

Dean throws him an incredulous, dirty look. "Screw the morning!" he exclaims. "Other people were changed and abducted, _they_ could be _dead_ by morning. And for all we know, Sammy could be too!"

This gives Sam pause. "Uh, what?" he asks, confused.

Dean rolls his eyes. "Come on, don't be stupid. The way I see it, there are two possibilities, right? One, I simply got de-aged, I'm still me, the me you know, but with a twenty years off promotion. Okay, great, apart from…" He gestures at himself. "You know, _everything_. But it's still better than the alternative."

"The alternative?" Sam asks.

Dean meets his gaze and there is something, in his eyes, something young and lost, like he really doesn't want to think about what he's about to say. "That we got swapped. That me me is here but old me's been sent back to '93, which means that that crazy psycho with the Mark is running around near the motel where Sammy is, and the idiot's probably wondering where I've gone and getting ready to go check even though I _told_ him to stay put and—"

That second possibility hadn't occurred to Sam, but now that he thinks about it…

"Dean wouldn't hurt him," he says softly, cutting off the teenager's near-frantic rant.

The skepticism in Dean's gaze only badly hides his worry. "Wouldn't he?" he asks, defiant. "Even when confused and angry, and half-rabid? How can you be so sure?"

Clearly his doubts about himself weren't born yesterday.

"I just am," Sam says, quiet and certain, because that's all he has: faith, entirely unwavering because he won't let it falter.

A strange expression darts over Dean's face. "Yeah, well, _I_ 'm not," he says. "This is wrong anyway," he adds, gesturing at everything around him. "The sooner it's dealt with, the better. You get your brother back, and I can go back to mine. I have a _job_ , you know."

Sam sighs. "I know," he says, even though part of him is sad that even now, in such a situation, Dean's first thought is to his little brother's safety before he considers his own. "Okay. We'll check out the place where I found you, see if we find something there. But we'll wait till tomorrow to do anything else, okay?"

Dean rolls his eyes, but agrees.

 

*

 

They find some sort of pollen at the scene, which seems to link back to what their only witness said. Apparently the guy was more reliable than he looked. Somewhat.

Dean's the one to find it and he's pumped, ready to go break and enter into the nearest library to try and identify the plant.

Sam insists they go back to the motel instead.

"What? _Why_?" Dean complains. "We can't stop now, we have a lead, we should be checking it out!"

"Oh, we will check it out all right. _At the motel_." By which he means: I'll check it out, _you_ , on the other hand, will sleep.

" _How_?" Dean asks. "By channel surfing? Did TV become smart in the last twenty years?"

"We do have a compu—" Sam breaks off, suddenly realizing something: to Dean, it's 1993. There are next to no laptops and, most of all, next to no internet.

"I have something to show you," he says. "I think you'll like it."

 

*

 

He thought right. Dean's… enthusiastic, to say the least. "Dude," he says, eyes wide, riveted at the screen. "This is _awesome_."

Sam's realizing he might have made a mistake. He tries taking back control of his laptop, only to have his hands batted away.

"Paws off, I can do this," Dean claims.

"Okay," Sam says, backing off with a chuckle. He can't very well say no, with Dean looking his age and acting like the child he is for the first time since all this began.

It's a good thing he's no father, part of him thinks. Clearly, he's far too much of a pushover.

 

*

 

Leaving Dean to his exploration of the internet, he goes fetch some books in the car that could be of use. Books on magic, a couple herbariums. Dean has retreated to one of the beds by the time he returns, back leaning against the headboard and computer on his lap, so Sam settles at the table.

He's discarded one book as useless and is leafing through a second one when he starts hearing… sounds.

Quite recognizable sounds.

He glances over suspiciously, only to see Dean gaping at the screen, a familiar glazed look in his eyes while a flush creeps up his neck.

He _never_ should've left him alone with his laptop, on the internet, with utter free reign. _Never_.

"Dude," he exclaims. "Are you watching porn?"

Dean startles and looks at him like a deer stuck in headlights. "What? No!" But he flails when Sam stands up, starts hitting the keys and touchpad at random to stop the video or close the window. He even succeeds: by the time Sam wrestles the computer from his hands—clearly he has the physical advantage this time and it'd be amusing, if Dean didn't feel so small and frail under his hands, so easy to push back… or throw against a wall, if he wanted.

"I can't believe it," he says, trying not to linger on that last worrying thought. "Or no, I should've _known_. I should've put parental control on that thing before I allowed you—"

"Come on, Sam!" Dean pleads, still trying to get the laptop back while Sam opens the browser history, because he needs to know how bad it was. "I'm a dude, I have needs! And it's not like I went looking for it, it was just there!"

"You're _fourteen_ ," Sam retorts. "There are things you should not be watching, especially not—" The page finishes loading and his eyebrows twitch up. "Is that _gay_ porn?"

Dean freezes and blanches, for a second utterly paralyzed by terror. Then Sam raises his eyebrows, 100% unimpressed and in no way threatening, and Dean suddenly turns bright red. "Look, I just clicked on a picture, okay? I didn't know it'd be… _that_!" He flails again.

Sam wonders what kind of picture caught his attention and how it could make him believe that he was signing up for straight porn. Or how that excuse is supposed to hold since he started the video even though its content was pretty explicitly advertised in the title _and_ preview.

Sam decides to let that rest for now.

"And _why_ did you click on the pic?" he asks instead. "Weren't you supposed to be looking for something else?"

"I was," Dean admits. "And I found it, I _totally_ did." He brandishes a slip of paper covered in messy scribbles. "Apparently it's yarrow. It's used in witchcraft."

He says it victoriously and Sam realizes that, at fourteen, Dean still hasn't learned why he hates witches.

"Great," he says, taking the notes from Dean's hand to read them while he installs the strongest parental control he can manage on his browser and launches a scan for any virus that could've sneaked in. "Question is though: how are we going to find them? I doubt they're growing that thing in their backyard."

 

*

 

Actually, the witches _are_ growing that thing in their backyard.

After some—lots of—time spent driving around the following day, they find a house that is literally surrounded by yarrow. They discreetly scope out the garden, which confirms it's the right place: they hear someone banging on a window opening onto the basement, trying to call for help without attracting any undue attention.

The window is barred, so they can't get the girl out to take her to safety. They have to enter and probably deal with the witches first.

"We'll get you out of here, I promise," Dean reassures her before they double back towards the car to gear up.

Once there he takes a gun, makes sure it's loaded and that the safety is on, grabs one of the bottles of Molotov cocktail they prepared for the occasion.

"Okay," he says, psyching himself up. He throws Sam a glance that's supposed to be all confidence and swagger—but he's still nothing but five and a half feet tall, young and, no matter how hard he's trying to hide it, afraid. "Let's go torch these bitches."

Sam is temped to cuff him to the car so he has no choice but to stay behind.

They spent half the drive fighting about it, actually. It started with Sam expressing his doubts by laying out a plan in which they got the prisoners out first—if there was any—and Dean would stay with them while Sam went to deal with the witch or witches. Dean shot it down at once, stating that hunting was never a one man job.

"Oh, I don't know, Dad seemed to do just fine," Sam pointed out.

"Yeah, well, he ain't here right now," Dean retorted and Sam briefly wondered where he thought John was, if he suspected the truth and refrained from asking for that precise reason. "And like it or not, my job when that's the case is to look after your ass, so I'm going in."

"Oh, come on! That's preposterous."

"Getting out the big words, I see," Dean snarked.

"Say what you want, this is still no place for—" He cut himself off.

After a couple of seconds Dean prompted: "For who?" Daring Sam to say it.

"For a kid," Sam replied, quiet but no less firm. "It's no place for a kid."

He kept his eyes on the road but could see out of the corner of his eye how Dean froze, before his face folded into the ugliest of scowls.

" _Fuck you_ ," he snarled, voice choked with far too many emotions to parse out. There was anger there, hurt, but other things too—and, buried deep underneath, a hint of resentment. "I'm _not_ a kid."

Sam found himself unable to contradict him because—

Because it was true, in a way. Dean had never been _allowed_ to be a kid, not even at fourteen, not even when he was younger than that.

Dean took his silence as a concession and grumbled: "I'm going in. And you can't stop me."

And he refused to talk for the rest of the journey.

So here they are. The gun still looks wrong in Dean's hands and all Sam wants to do is lock him inside the car.

Unfortunately, he knows Dean will manage to weasel his way out of it if he does, and will probably drop in on the fight at the worst, most dangerous moment possible. Better to keep him close, to keep an eye on him—and hope that this time is not one of those that go awfully awry.

"Okay," he says, taking the lead. "Stay behind me. Stay close."

He glances over his shoulder to make sure Dean does and sees him roll his eyes. "Yes, _dad_ ," he scoffs.

Sam nearly freezes. Of all the times to be compared to John…

He pushes it all down, and heads towards the house.

 

*

 

In the end, it's a good thing that Dean's there—and that the means to return him to his thirty-six year old body are so simple. Having taken advantage of a second of inattention from the bad guys to recover his mass and strength, he stabs the witch's associate with a knife Sam doesn't remember him taking from the trunk and pushes the witch into the fire in which she was planning to roast her prisoner, in a very old-fashioned witch way.

The remedy burns with her, though, which means that the surviving girl, Tina, is stuck as a teenager. She takes it with a lot more grace than could've been expected, especially since her last memories go back to over twenty years ago.

They buy her a bus ticket to Sioux Falls and call Jody to tell her to expect a new arrival. They also give her Charlie's number, in case she needs to tweak some official files.

It's then and only then that they can finally talk about what happened. From what he says, Dean remembers everything, which seems to imply that he was indeed de-aged, instead of swapped with his younger self.

Sam is relieved that the boy's fears were unfounded and that he didn't jinx anything by revealing so much to him about his own future.

"But you know, I was convinced it was the other option," Dean admits.

"What, that you got swapped?"

"Yeah." He throws Sam a half-hearted smirk. "It was a lot easier to think of us—fourteen years old me and now me—as two entirely different persons, ya know?"

Sam isn't sure he does, but he does remember how the teenager talked about his older self, the man he was told he'd become. Clearly he hadn't liked the thought.

Something in Dean's expression tells Sam that even now, Dean doesn't either.

"The Mark's back, isn't it?" he asks.

"Yeah," Dean replies. He doesn't need to push up his sleeve to check, as if he feels its presence that acutely. And Sam gets why his fourteen year old self didn't hesitate for a second before he used the remedy—given the situation and since he apparently thought they had been swapped—, but he can't help but wonder… If he had known, if he'd had proof that he was simply de-aged, would he have done the same? Or would he have chosen to stay a teenager, even torn out of his time, away from everything he knew, if it meant the Mark would stay gone?

There's no way to know, though. And Sam feels it wouldn't be fair to ask Dean to answer that question now.

"It's going to be okay, you know," he says instead.

Dean throws him a quizzical look.

"You're gonna beat this thing," Sam assures him. "I know it."

Dean doesn't answer, just huffs and gives him a quick, cocky smile—a silent: "Yeah, of course"—before he turns to start the car. But for some reason Sam sees right through it, sees the fortifying breath he takes as he puts the Impala into gear, sees the look he's covering up at the bottom of his eyes. He sees how underneath all the bluster there's still that fourteen year old kid—so young, so afraid, helpless and lost and desperately trying to hold it together in a world made of things so much bigger than he is.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also [on tumblr](www.princessniitza.tumblr.com) if you want to flail and cry over Dean Winchester's crappy childhood.


End file.
